valve made it clear they "themselves" dont want to be responsible making and selling the hardware.but with the scope they seem to be setting, it might be a nice time for valve to support steam badged computers, such could look like a console, and have good support will most of the steam games out there.big picture mode can certainly flourish without the microsoft windows restrictions, further optimizing and centralizing a media experience.

also, haikarainen, arch and ubuntu are simply packages, valves little toy can easily run without both systems desktops and managers if they wanted a full desktop experience, so which distro it runs on is absolutely pointlessif big picture stays exclusively as a desktop-overlay, then you might feel a bit of lag behind what your using.

finally, i think someone already created a openbox configuration with steam big-picture automatically launching, its worth a checkout if you want it hooked up to your t.v. this early in the beta

The main obstacles I see is making it caveman easy for people to connect their PC to their TV without having to switch cables and and worrying about both being in a completely different rooms maybe. Same goes for the controller. PC might not be in the room where your TV is.If that is fixed I see no reason why someone should ever again buy a Playstation or XBox, when your PC can act and feel like a console without to much hassle.

When you're in your little home office you can use your PC for work. When you're in your living room just grab your controller and use your PC as a gaming console with all the benefits a PC has ( more powerful, upgradeable etc.)

Making a Steam OS is super easy. You only need to change one file to boot directly into steam. I did this for the regular GUI but BPM works aswell. With some fixes to the sysctl the steam login is much faster now and I'm logged in in under 20 seconds.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5JFQbjJk7w&feature=g-upl

Instead of coming up with yet another console i think it would be smarter to make your PC do both and be just as conveniant as a console.

Why should people spend money on a PC which they probably need for work and other stuff anyway and buy a second devices which is probably also powerful enough to do your office work but instead is only used for gaming on your couch. I'd rather have one device do both and the PC probably is better at doing both than a console running Microsoft Office when it needs to.

Technically you could already make your own Steam OS/Box. There's a patch for LightDM someone made that lets you boot straight into Big Picture mode. You could slap Ubuntu minimal onto a PC get only the packages you need, add the patch, and for aesthetics customize Plymouth to have a Steam looking theme. Also, have the system just auto login so you never see LightDM. Actually they could have accounts linked to Steam accounts so you go through a list in LightDM of Steam users and login to your Steam box like you would on Xbox Live or PSN.